Rehoboth voters now have to decide how to divvy up their tax dollars and other town revenue after a failed Proposition 2½ override vote left their town government with a gaping budget shortfall.

A special Town Meeting is scheduled in Rehoboth for Thursday, Aug. 7, at 7 p.m., in the auditorium of Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High School, where voters are being presented choices on how to move forward with the unbalanced budget, according to a statement from the Board of Selectmen.

One article will ask the voters to look at the $22.1 million town budget previously passed at the spring Town Meeting, excluding $14,988,625 in school spending, and decide on $1,658,740 in cuts to non-school expenses. The second article would be “to contemplate” additional spending, which would likely be contingent on another override vote, selectmen said in a statement released along with the special Town Meeting warrant.

However, the Board of Selectmen has yet to come up with a recommended modified budget to resolve the shortfall, and continues to hear from town department heads on how much spending they can cut, Selectman David Perry said.

“We haven’t done all the cuts,” Perry said. “We are still looking.”

Perry said that selectmen are working on a tight time frame.

“We like to refer to it as a moving target right now,” he said.

Selectmen are meeting tonight at 7 p.m. at the Rehoboth Council on Aging to hear the final input of department heads, Perry said.

“Then it’s up to us to formulate where final cuts are going to be,” he said.

Perry also said that he’s not sure if another Proposition 2½ vote to fund a supplemental budget is actually feasible in terms of the fiscal schedule the town is on.

“There is barely enough time to schedule a second override,” he said. “It would be nice and solve a lot of problems if it was what we refer to as a ‘soft override’ at this point.”

Selectmen also told voters about the existence of stabilization accounts totaling $1,296,527 that they can tap into, including $834,943 that can only be used for capital improvements and can’t be used to offset operational deficits.

But Perry and other selectmen said that using these funds is not ideal.

“It’s not a place we want to go,” Perry said.

A third item on the warrant is a petition asking voters to secure $228,141 to keep the Blanding Public Library open, using the amount that was previously recommended by the Finance Committee.

The town’s budget shortfall originated at the May Town Meeting where supporters of the Dighton-Rehoboth Regional School Committee secured a nearly $1.7 million increase in their budget from what was recommended by the Finance Committee. Members of the School Committee and their supporters explained that $1.2 million of that increase was because of a correction to a flawed assessment formula used by the school district in recent years to divide costs between Dighton and Rehoboth.

Page 2 of 2 - The voters at May Town Meeting decided to make the school spending increase specifically without making it dependent on a successful Proposition 2½ vote, making the decision irreversible. The budget shortfall to the rest of town government spending was then up to vote at the failed Proposition 2½ referendum earlier this month. The town has been working off of a temporary 90-day budget that was passed at another special Town Meeting on June 30.

Rehoboth Finance Committee Chairman Michael Deignan previously said that the general town government budget is approximately $8.4 million, with $5.8 million of that being salaries and benefits and other personnel related costs. The remainder of that $2.6 million covers expense-related items, he said, of which $1.3 million is state-mandated or fixed costs which the town cannot remove, such as the cost of veterans benefits. Deignan said layoffs would be on the table.

The Town Clerk’s Office announced that it will be open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. today, the last day to register to vote in the Aug. 7 special Town Meeting.